22nd March 2001 Archive

Documents now available on the Rambusite show that the real reason the patent trial between Rambus and Infineon is delayed is because a fresh deposition accuses Siemens Semiconductor, which spun off Infineon as a separate unit, of deliberately and knowingly appropriating its technology.

US Dramurai Micron Technology yesterday cut is proposed spending on new chip-making equipment and facilities after revealing it had made a profit - just - for its most recently completed fiscal quarter.

Mobile phone giants Motorola, Ericsson and Siemens have unified their efforts to turn the cellphone into a portable gaming platform. The result is a plan to define a "universal" - ie. open - mobile games platform.

France Telecom has released its annual results, with net profits for 2000 of £2.3 billion (£2.15 a share) and a reduced operating margin of 14.4 per cent from 16.5 per cent. The profits were slightly lower than expected and saw the telecom giant's share price fall 0.34 per cent.

The European Parliament will continue its investigation into the Echelon spying system today in Brussels. A temporary committee was set up half way through last year when reports of the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand-sponsored spying system entered wide circulation.

A company in which the Queen invested £100,000 is to drop its .com suffix due to poor sales. The value of Liz's stake in Getmapping.com - a company which sells aerial photographs of the UK - has slumped from a high of £900,000 to just £70,000 following the dotcom collapse.

Phil Zimmermann - creator of the OpenPGP encryption software - is playing down a flaw discovered in his hugely popular program, saying that someone would still need access to your hard drive to break the code.

The great WinXP Beta 2 roadshow showed clear signs of degenerating into farce today, as a build that was ever so nearly, nearly shippable as Beta 2 last night, maybe any minute now, somehow magically translated itself into Beta 2 code "ready to roll" and "on track" for shipment on, er, Friday. Bear in mind, friends, that although the date March 21st was widely understood as the ship date for Beta 2, and is widely thought to be some three weeks after the date Microsoft first thought of, it can't be late because Microsoft only ever said Q1, and we've got a whole nine more days of that.